Broken Sword Creator Chooses Human Artists Over AI for 55,000 Frames in 2027 Remake

The original release being remade sold 759,000 copies and follows American tourist George Stobbart and freelance journalist Nicole Collard as they track a mysterious Mayan stone across Paris, London and Central America. The remake's hand-drawn art has been redone entirely, producing about 55,000 frames of animation, more than the 30,000 frames used in the 2024 remake of Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars.

Cecil pointed to an early scene in which George opens a newspaper and glances at the screen. He said George looks at the viewer, which is what human beings do, and that is not something AI can do. In low resolution, eyes were just dots on a face, Cecil said, but in high resolution they are windows to the soul and therefore have to be animated with precision and intent. Where applicable, artists were free to add flourishes and use their own interpretation to fill in gaps.

Revolution Software also redrew details that were previously unclear. The painting of Professor Oubier hanging in the rapidly burning study was always too pixelated to see clearly, but it can now be made out in 4K at 36 times the original resolution while a visibly uncomfortable George jostles his rope bindings. Dozens of items were redrawn as well, including the poison dart, which now looks less like a playing dart and more like something shot out of a blowpipe.

AI was not entirely absent from the project. It was used for the initial round of upscaling before artists added detail by hand, with backgrounds scanned as black-and-white layouts for them to build on using the originals as references. Cecil said the team experimented with AI for the first remake, using it to upscale and then redraw characters, and that AI can upscale but cannot put any character in. In this project, AI was more of a tool than a creative device.

The remake also gave the developers time to address old shortcuts. The first game needed to be made in a year or risk cancellation, and 40 voice lines were recorded and packaged in the game's files but never used. Fans can now hear them in the remake, including one line in which George asks a Parisian waiter about the tequila worm in his pocket. Cecil also recalled a bug in the Game Boy Advance version: players could choose to go to Spain or Syria, but one path allowed them to finish the game while the other led them there and then prevented completion. Cecil called it an awful and shocking bug.

Cecil said the remake is far from a bug-fixing exercise and is almost an act of excavation. He said Revolution Software has self-published all its games for the last 15 years, which allows it to decide when to spend more time getting something right. The developers added a new three-tier hint system that monitors progress and offers increasingly obvious tips, with the final tip telling players outright what to do; purists can turn it off. On Nintendo Switch 2, players get four control schemes: touchscreen, gamepad, one Joy-Con 2 detached and used as a mouse, or a combination of everything. Cecil also added a detailed map of Paris he had wanted to include for 30 years, using it to aid navigation instead of relying on clunky icons.